Share this:

Eric A. Cornell - Biographical

I was born in
Palo Alto, California in 1961. My parents were completing
graduate degrees at Stanford. Two years later we moved to
Cambridge, Massachusetts, the city I consider to be my hometown.
My father was a professor of civil engineering at MIT, and my mother
taught high school English. The family, including my younger
brother and sister, accompanied my father on sabbatical years to
Berkeley, California and Lisbon, Portugal. These were wonderful
experiences for me and no doubt they are in part to blame for my
lifelong love of travel.

My mother taught me to read when I was
still quite young, and at least in my memory I passed the
majority of my childhood reading. My head was always bubbling
over with facts and it seems to me this had little to do with my
paying close attention in school and more to do with my voracious
and omnivorous reading habits. Indeed in elementary school I
often kept my desktop slightly open and affected an alert-looking
pose that still allowed me to peek into the desk where I kept
open my latest book, as interesting as it was irrelevant to the
academic subject at hand. Every so often my hand slipped
surreptitiously into the desk to turn the page. In the
intervening three decades I have spent plenty of time lecturing
in front of a classroom of my own, and in retrospect I realize I
was seldom fooling anyone. Most of my teachers probably found I
made less trouble if they let me read.

Some nights, especially in the early summer
when the late evening light kept my west-facing bedroom from
getting very dark, I had trouble falling asleep at my appointed
bedtime. My parents probably felt that reading me a story was a
little redundant, but on occasion my father would come in and
suggest to me a "problem" to think about. Stewing over these
problems was supposed to help me go to sleep. It never did that,
but it did get me in the lifelong habit of thinking about
technical issues at all sorts of random moments in my daily life,
and not only (or even primarily) during scheduled "thinking
time." Some of my father's bedtime problems I now recognize as
classic physics brainteasers. A man driving a van full of
beehives comes to a bridge. The combined weight of the truck,
bees, and beehives barely exceeds the safety limit of the bridge.
The driver comes up with the idea of banging on the side of the
van, so that all the bees swarm out of the hive and fly around in
the back of the van. Does the fact that the bees are now all
airborne make the truck light enough to safely cross the bridge?
Other problems were exercises in mental estimation. If you hold
out your thumb, at arms length, you can just about cover the moon
with your thumb. The moon is a quarter of a million miles away.
How big is it?

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years,
was a transitional period in American youth culture. It was
already past the peak of the era when science-minded kids built
radios, model airplanes, rockets - things of that sort. But it
was certainly well before the heyday of computers and video
games. I was partly old-fashioned and partly modern. I certainly
remember building model rockets. It was fun to watch the rocket
blast into the air, suspenseful to wonder if the parachute would
open to bring the rocket safely back. I didn't really enjoy the
assembling the model kits very much, and usually I couldn't be
bothered to paint the thing, or even to stick on the decals. A
more vivid memory for me was designing a model of my own. Besides
the store-bought kits, the Estes Model Rocketry company in those
days also sold by mail various sizes of cardboard tubing,
balsa-wood sheets, nosecones, and gun-powder rocket engines.
Estes also published a terrific little booklet full of
quantitative design tips. A key issue in rocket design is to make
sure that the center of mass is well forward from the fins, lest
the rocket be aerodynamically unstable. My father showed me how
(after a candidate design was laid out on graph paper) to
calculate the center of mass of the assembly based on the masses
and distribution of the component parts. I designed an
over-sized, under-powered, clunky sort of rocket. I didn't care
how high it would go - I wanted it to rise slowly enough that I
could watch to see if its orientation wobbled during the flight.
On its maiden flight it lifted off the ground with all the
ponderousness of a Saturn V, rising steady and true but rolling
slightly about its long axis (had I glued the fins on crooked?)
as it gained altitude. The engine burn completed, and then the
parachute popped and my creation drifted with the wind to land on
the roof of a schoolhouse. My parents suggested I go on Monday
morning to ask the school's janitor to retrieve my rocket, but
this I was too shy to do.

My freshman year of high school I joined
the chess and math clubs. The clubs met after school in the
computer-instruction classroom, under the loose supervision of a
genial polymath with the unlikely name of Mr. Wisdom. Between
rounds of speed chess I read enough of a programming manual to
teach myself to write programs on the school's DEC mainframe in
the language Basic. For several months I was really captivated
with this new activity. The exercises in the Basic manual seemed
pretty tedious so I invented a few projects for myself, including
a program to generate word puzzles for the math club newsletter.
After a semester or so, my infatuation with computers burnt out
as quickly as it had begun. Not enough substance there to sustain
interest, I felt. This episode is probably the basis for my
lifelong distaste for "computers for computers' sake" - it's a
kids' game, I think. A second legacy of my brief childhood
infatuation with computers was a life-long secret preference for
programming in Basic, although during my years of apprenticeship
in other scientists' labs I was compelled to learn both C and
Fortran. When eventually I had the opportunity to establish a lab
of my own, one of my first acts as a young principal investigator
was to write a program to output a precisely timed sequence of
electronic pulses to control the lasers and magnetic fields in
what was to become the first successful Bose-Einstein
condensation apparatus. Of course, I wrote the program in
Basic!

Some of my classes in high school were
pretty interesting and I benefited from having several very
intelligent and inspiring teachers. Among these were John Samp, a
physics teacher, and JoAnn Walther, an English teacher. After the
Nobel Prize announcement, I got back in touch with them and was
delighted to learn that they are still (as of 2001) teaching at
my old high school.

Just before my final year of high school,
my brother, sister and I moved with my mother to San Francisco. I
spent my last year of high school there, at Lowell High School. Lowell High was a so-called
"magnet school," drawing academically inclined students from all
over the city. My fellow students there were very smart, but the
really novel thing was that they actually seemed to put a lot of
effort into their school work. By the end of my first semester
there, I began to get into that habit as well. Something else new
at Lowell was that it was "cool" to excel at school, at least
among the Asian kids with whom I mostly hung out. Without the
transitional year at Lowell, my first year as an undergraduate at
Stanford
would have been a horrible shock.

The truth is that first year at Stanford
was a shock anyway, although not for academic reasons. Everyone
was beautiful, self-confident, self-satisfied. Later I moved into
a student-run, co-op house and felt more at home in that
"alternative" residential atmosphere. It was there I met my
future wife, Celeste Landry, although our lives took us separate
ways for many years and we were not to marry until more than ten
years later.

My first job in physics was as a "scanner"
at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. As a freshman I
needed to earn a little money and I was looking for a way to
learn about science at the same time. The advertised hourly wage
was unusually high for a campus job, which should have been a
danger sign. On my first day on the job, a postdoc spent 30
minutes or so showing me how to call up symbolic representations
of an endless series of archived detector "events," for display
on a graphics terminal. There was a particular kind of rare event
I was to look for - I can't remember now exactly what it was -
characterized by a certain precise number of photons, of muons,
etc. The postdoc explained to me how to distinguish different
sorts of particles on the basis of the amounts of energy they
deposited in various sorts of detectors, spark chambers,
calorimeters, what have you. When I recognized a promising event,
I was to flag it by pressing a certain key on the terminal, and,
"pop", another event would come up on the screen for my
consideration. After my 30-minute training period was up, the
educational part of the job (and incidentally the part of the job
involving any human interaction) was essentially finished. I
could come in whenever I wanted, work as many hours as I wanted.
The money was great but towards the end of the third mind-numbing
afternoon of staring at the graphics terminal I realized my
sanity was at risk. I decided to quit right then and there, and
wandered around the data center looking for someone to notify of
my decision. There were plenty of people buzzing around the room,
but no one looked familiar. It occurred to me that, after the
original 30-minute training period, I had never again seen the
postdoc who had taught me the tricks of the high-energy physics
trade. Finally I just wandered out of the building, never to
return. Over the course of my three afternoons I had worked my
way through hundreds of stored events, and flagged four of them
as promising candidates. Is it possible those four events
eventually got my postdoc a nice assistant professor position at
the University
of Chicago? One can always wonder!

Meanwhile, I was taking freshman physics
with Blas Cabrera, then only in his second year as a professor,
and eventually I worked up the nerve to approach him after class.
Did he have a position in his lab for an undergraduate? He did! I
started off building some data acquisition electronics for a
scanning magnetometer, sharing a lab bench with a fellow
undergraduate, Charlie Marcus. For the remainder of my years at
Stanford I worked afternoons and summers for low-temperature
physics groups on campus. I really enjoyed this experience, and
it was these jobs, more than anything else, that persuaded me to
pursue a career in scientific research.

Roughly halfway through my undergraduate
years, I began to worry that my future was choosing me, instead
of the other way around. Time seemed to be accelerating. Had I
really already completed nearly two years of college? I was
taking lots of science classes, spending lots more time in
physics labs, and was doing well there. In a little more than a
year, the most natural thing for me to do would be to apply to
physics graduate school. Doubtless I would be admitted, and then
- zoom - off I would go into a pre-defined future as a scientific
researcher. It seemed somehow too pat, too canned. When was it
that I actually got to decide the course of my own future life?
Perhaps I would be happier pursuing something a little more
explicitly intellectual than physics. Maybe a return to my first
love, of books, was in order. I had been studying Mandarin
Chinese for a quarter or two. I took a great interest in
politics. Couldn't I put together some sort of future with all
that in mind? The first thing I needed was to buy a little time
to think it over, lest I be out the door with a degree before I
knew what had happened. A Stanford program called Volunteers in
Asia seemed to offer me that time. So the summer following my
second year of college, I went off to the YMCA in Taichung,
Taiwan, to teach conversational English. The work was pleasant
and not very hard; I had a lot of time to read and to think and
to study Chinese. Six months after that, I left Taiwan, first for
Hong Kong and then for mainland China, where I spent another
three months studying still more Chinese and generally kicking
around the country.

Travel provided many interesting
experiences, but perhaps the most useful lesson I learned was
that I really had no proficiency for learning the thousands of
characters of the written Chinese language. It is not that my
memory is generally poor. I am very good at remembering the
lyrics to popular songs. A single line from a popular song
probably represents about as many bits of information as a single
Chinese character. If I could have displaced the one set of
information with the other, I would have had no problem storing
in my brain the 5000 characters necessary for advanced Chinese
literacy. As it was, I realized choosing the study of Chinese
literature as my life's work was probably a mistake. Conversely,
I came to realize that being good at something is hardly a reason
to avoid doing it.

I returned to Stanford with much more of a
sense of purpose. I continued to take elective courses in such
topics as poetry and political science, but I allowed myself to
enjoy my physics courses and my work in the labs. My last two
years at Stanford I worked for the gyroscope-based general
relativity experiment of Francis Everett and co-workers, with my
final year's work growing into an honors project. Everett was the
titular advisor of my honors thesis, but I worked more closely
with John Turneaure, a research professor. The gyroscope
relativity experiment needed data on the low-temperature
adsorption properties of helium on various technical materials
such as OFHC copper, fused quartz and so on. I inherited a
recently abandoned apparatus and was told to extend the range of
temperatures and go beyond monolayer coverage. I went to see John
for advice as needed, but other than that I was left to work
alone. No doubt I wasted a lot of time reinventing the wheel, but
I loved the sensation of "having my own lab."

For graduate school I returned to
Cambridge. In the spring of 1985, shopping around for a graduate
school and a research project, I met Dave Pritchard at MIT. He
spun me a wonderful yarn: by very precisely measuring the mass
difference between the helium-3 and tritium, one can determine
the total amount of energy released in the beta decay of tritium.
Combine this mass measurement with a determination (no big deal,
Dave implied) of the endpoint of the beta-ray spectrum, and one
has measured the rest mass of the electron neutrino! There were
hints, in those days, that the neutrino might have a rest mass as
large as ten eV, a value of cosmological significance. Think of
it, Dave said: working with two or three other students on a
bench-top experiment, one might just find the missing dark mass
and close the universe! It sounded awfully good to me. It still
does, as I retell it today.

Thus in the fall of 1985 I joined Dave's
single-ion cyclotron resonance experiment. The idea was to trap a
single ion in a Penning trap, measure its cyclotron frequency to
great accuracy, then swap in a different species of ion and do a
comparison measurement. The ratio of cyclotron frequencies should
be just the inverse of the ratio of masses. Two graduate
students, Robert Weisskoff and Bob Flanagan, and a postdoc, Greg
Lafyatis, had the apparatus designed and largely assembled by the
time I arrived, but we didn't succeed in trapping and detecting
single ions until three years later. The work got to be pretty
frustrating and when at last one morning Robert finally acquired
the definitive signal from a single ion, he said "That is that."
By that afternoon he had begun writing his thesis and he did not
return to the ion lab again. A new graduate student Kevin Boyce
had recently joined the group and the two of us spent a couple of
years learning how to make precision measurements on the single
ions.

It is hard to overstate how much I learned
from Dave Pritchard over my five years as a graduate student. He
was seldom in the lab, but he ate lunch with us students several
days a week, and held regular progress meetings as well. Meeting
with Dave could be a fairly overwhelming experience. He
frequently was in a sort of quizmaster mode, in which he peppered
his student with questions. "How big is this effect? You don't
know? That's fine, but why don't you estimate it for me then? No,
don't offer to go away and think about it - work it out right
now, out loud, for the benefit of all of us here." His quiz
sessions could be aggravating or even intimidating, but in the
end I found them to be great training. Dave liked to show us how
widely disparate effects in quantum and classical physics could
be understood with the same basic and rather small set of ideas
such as resonance, adiabaticity, stationary points, dressed
states, entropy and so on. To this day I have ambitions of
designing a course called "The Seven Most Useful Ideas in
Physics," that would somehow condense and codify the Pritchardian
wisdom. Thus it was that when my five years of grad school were
over, while I had come nowhere near to finding the Universe's
missing mass, I still felt enthused enough about physics research
to proceed on to a postdoc.

There are relatively few experiments in
atomic physics these days that don't involve the use of a laser.
One major shortcoming in my graduate education in preparing me
for a career in atomic physics research was that I had not
learned any laser techniques. I felt my postdoctoral job had
better fill in that lacuna. Looking for a postdoc job, I made the
usual rounds, visiting Yale, Stanford, Bell Labs, Gaithersburg, and so on. Laser
cooling was in its heyday in 1990, and as I traveled around I saw
all the major programs. I was a little daunted by the size and
complexity of the experiments, and worried also that maybe all
the really interesting experiments had already been done.
Finally, I went out to Boulder to give a talk to Dave Wineland's
group in NIST labs. Dave Wineland was and is one of
the towering figures in ion trapping, so I felt a little foolish,
earnestly describing to his group my modest contribution, but I
soldiered on through my talk. No job offer was forthcoming, but
as luck would have it, in the audience was a former
Wineland-group postdoc, Sarah Gilbert. Sarah called her husband,
Carl Wieman, who was looking to hire a postdoc, and suggested
that he invite me to make the one kilometer trek from NIST labs
over to JILA, on the University of Colorado campus, to visit his
lab. At this time the main focus of Carl's research was on
precision measurements of parity violation in cesium, but my
attention was immediately drawn to his smaller, laser cooling
experiment. In contrast to the other laser cooling experiments I
had seen, which took up the better part of a room, Carl's
experiment could have fit on a card table. Using diode lasers
instead of Ar+-pumped dye lasers, and using a tiny
little vapor cell instead of an atomic beam machine, the whole
experiment seemed accessible and compact, even cute. There was
just one graduate student working on the project, and this
impressed me as well - if a single student could make it work,
how hard could it be? (It would be almost a year later before I
realized that Chris Monroe was not exactly an average graduate
student!) It was clear to me that during a two-year postdoc I
could learn how to make a fun little laser-cooling set up like
Carl's, and, looking ahead, it also seemed to me that I could
duplicate such an experiment as an assistant professor without
much trouble. It would be sufficiently easy to constract that
that I would have energy, time and money left over to use the
cold atoms in turn to study something else; I would not be
compelled to catch up with the established major AMO groups that
were studying the cooling process itself.

With an offer from Carl in my pocket, I
went back to Cambridge to write up my dissertation. While
considering the offer, I began to think for the first time of
attempting to see Bose-Einstein condensation (BEC). BEC was a
natural thing for atomic physics student at MIT to think about:
occupying the office next to Dave Pritchard was Dan Kleppner,
co-leader (with Tom Greytak) of one of the major groups
attempting to see BEC in spin-polarized hydrogen. The idea of BEC
was in the air, and I had seen a number of talks on the topic.
Just a year earlier the MIT BEC group had dramatically succeeded
in implementing evaporative cooling out of a magnetic trap, a
clever idea due to Harold Hess. The MIT hydrogen experiment was
daunting in its size and complexity, whereas it seemed to me that
if one took as one's starting point the relatively tractable
vapor-cell, laser-cooling technology that Wieman was using, it
wouldn't be so much of a stretch to imagine souping it up into an
apparatus capable of evaporatively cooling to BEC. So I decided
to head off to Boulder for a couple of years.

After accepting Carl's offer I postponed
actually moving to Boulder for three months while my then
girlfriend finished her PhD as well. In the meantime I took a
very short-term postdoctoral position working with Joel Parks at
the Rowland Institute, helping him design and build a Paul trap
for ionized atomic clusters.

In October of 1990 I arrived in Boulder. I
found working with Carl to be a very congenial experience. Carl
and I share very similar tastes in what makes for an interesting
physics experiment, and I was happy to assimilate a fraction of
his seemingly endless bag of technological ideas. Carl taught me
to decide what part of the experimental apparatus really
mattered, and then to spare no effort improving that part.
Conversely, Carl emphasized that one needs to recognize where
"good enough" was indeed good enough, and to waste no time
worrying about it. I learned from Carl's student, Chris Monroe,
as well. I had always been reluctant to mess with the innards of
a store-bought piece of equipment, lest I break something. Chris'
ever-fearless attitude was, if that gizmo isn't doing what we
need it to do now, how much worse off will we be even if we
do break it? As my two-year postdoctoral appointment wound
up, Carl, Chris and I had essentially defined what needed to be
done to make BEC with the hybridized method of laser cooling
followed by magnetic trapping and evaporative cooling.

During those early years in Boulder, I
spent a lot of time trying to imagine what a Bose-Einstein
condensate would be like, if we could ever make one. Would it be
superfluid, like liquid helium? Would it be coherent, like a
laser? What do "superfluid" and "coherent" really mean? I
understood these words in the context of the experiments the
words had been invented to describe, or at least I thought I did,
but it seemed to me that to understand how these words applied to
a dramatically different physical system, one had to have a much
deeper understanding. Superfluidity and lasing were two of my
favorite topics in physics, but each was surrounded by a vast
thicket of lore and literature. It was hard to step off of the
well-worn paths through these thickets, hard for a newcomer to
get a fresh look at the underlying phenomena. If one could make a
gas-phase condensate, one would have a less brambled system
against which to test one's own physical intuition. Meditations
along these lines converted me from BEC dabbler to true
believer.

It was with some zealotry, then, that I
took the "hybrid cooling to BEC" pitch on the road in 1992, in an
effort to find a faculty job. Berkeley and MIT did not bite, but
I had offers from Haverford College, University of
Virginia and JILA/NIST. The environment at JILA for doing AMO
research was so strong, I decided to accept their offer and
remain, against the advice of several people who pointed out the
potential risks of remaining in the shadow of my postdoctoral
advisor. As it turned out, over the years Carl was to be
extremely fair in the sharing of credit, and I have never
regretted my decision to stay at JILA.

The scientific developments from 1990 to
1995 leading to BEC are discussed in the companion article. In
the mid-1990s I ran a secondary research project in parallel with
my BEC effort. The idea was to extend the techniques of laser
cooling into solid-state systems. We never got it to work. In the
end, my sunny optimism was trumped by my complete lack of
training in solidstate spectroscopy. As it turned out, a group at
Los Alamos National Labs has since successfully cooled a solid
using a related experimental approach. Also in the mid-90s, Dana
Anderson and I began a project to construct waveguides for matter
waves. Our first successes were based on hollow glass fibers, but
our ongoing collaboration now focuses on guiding atoms with the
magnetic fields from lithographically patterned wires. The bulk
of my group's research efforts over the last seven years has
focused on elucidating the properties of BEC. With every passing
year, BEC proves that it still has surprises left for us. Most
lately my group has been pursuing studies of quantized vortices
in BEC and of spin-waves in ultra-cold atoms. This latter work
required us to retreat back above the BEC transition temperature!
(Although we are still comfortably within a millionth of a degree
of absolute zero.)

I have been very fortunate over the years
in the graduate students and postdocs who have come to work in my
lab. Their hard work, talent and creativity have made me look
good. I have been fortunate also to live in a society that values
scientific research, and is willing to support people to do
it.

In 1993, Celeste Landry and I rekindled an
old romance and we were married in January of 1995, in the
Stanford Faculty Club. At the time of our wedding, I had upcoming
professional travel to the ICOLS conference in Capri scheduled
for June, and we planned to delay our honeymoon until then. Just
two weeks before the ICOLS conference, the BEC experiment finally
succeeded. In beautiful Capri, with lovely Celeste, I felt on top
of the world.

The next year I experienced a still keener
pleasure, attending the birth of our daughter, Eliza. Her younger
sister, Sophia, arrived in 1998. The four of us live in an old
brick house in the shade of two large silver maples in central
Boulder.

This autobiography/biography was written
at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les
Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures/The Nobel Prizes. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted
by the Laureate.